Young Author Celebration

For as long as I can remember, the Volusia County Reading Department sponsored the Young Author Celebration. Each school chose 2 representatives to share their original work of literary art. Some wrote poems, short stories, fiction, and some even non-fiction. Due to the budget cuts this year the county wide celebration will not take place. However, at Cypress Creek Elementary the celebration lives on! Thanks to Debbie Tarmann and our Florida Future Educators of America club the aspiring authors will be celebrated at the end of March with a continental breakfast.
It takes so many drafts, editing, revising, and just plan hard work to come up with a final piece to submit for each student. We started about 2 weeks ago with a favorite family memory. Each child wrote and we discussed staying on topic, word choice, details, and even some time order vocabulary. We edited and revised and I sent them to the computer to type. By the way, our class has been fortunate enough to have been chosen to pilot mini-laptops in the 1st grade classrooms. We are using them to type and then print out the stories. Each child is anxiously awaiting their opportunity to try out the latest technology piece in the room. Gabi has worked on a story about her family trip to Brazil earlier this year. She lacked focus at first but when we sat down to talk she created a wonderful story about a special pizza place she visited with her family. She typed her story and then another round of revising and editing. She learned how to use the spell check and finally printed her story for the book. Her next steps are illustrating and her About the Author page. I have about 3 weeks to help along all the other children to have their works of art ready for the 19th deadline. I can't wait to see what happens and I hope you check back for updates on books we publish. Thank you Gabi for all your hard work! I knew you could do it and I am so proud of your book!